Martin Brundle: "The F1 feeder series, GP2, provides great racing entertainment for a team budget of £4m, rather than F1’s £200m. The FIA’s new F2 series is going to cost £250,000 per car. Taken to extremes, last weekend I watched Felipe Massa’s charity kart event where he, Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello and others were wheel-to-wheel around a small bumpy track in Brazil driving £2,000 karts. It was great entertainment."

'It is only ten days since Button was in Japan to meet Honda's top executives at the “Honda Thanksgiving Day”. Yesterday, the embarrassment clearly told among Honda's top executives as Takeo Fukui, the company's chief executive, apologised to Button during his announcement in Tokyo that Honda was quitting.'

"The Red Bull drinks business have been F1 team owners since buying out Ford's outfit in 2004 but their latest financial statements show that last year their spending hit top gear. In 2007, total costs at Red Bull Technology, the company which designs and builds cars for Red Bull Racing and sister team Toro Rosso, accelerated 22 per cent to £130.3m – the third-highest amount ever spent on a UK-based F1 team. Red Bull poured in most of this finance, with sponsorship only amounting to £10.25m."

Max Mosley: "I was imagining that one of the manufacturers might drop out because the money that's been spent has been unsustainable for some time. 'But Honda, one of the best-managed companies in the whole motor industry, were not the people you would expect to stop."

7 comments on F1 links: Brundle on cost-cutting

Really enjoyed the Martin Brundle article, he always talks alot of sense. However, you are left feeling like a first class passenger on the deck of the Titanic, waving the final lifeboat off. Hopeless!
The cost cutting measures a just fine, but I believe that it is all a case of too little, too late. Formula One has for too long lived ‘fat off the hog’, and reality is starting to set in. The reality is that the so called ‘downturn’ facing the world financial markets is not just an ordinary recession, a bump in the road, it is the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.
All of the past F1 teams of modern times that have failed, failed under alot more stable economic times than these that we are now faced with.
The upside to this is that Formula One has to make the correct decisions now, in this intant, or face extinction. The costs have to come down so that the teams, the circuits, and the sponsors can operate not at a loss but at a profit.
Also, there has to be a cap on drivers salaries. Kimi Raikkonen’s yearly wage haul is an obvious example, but there are others out there who are well than looked after. Finally, more money has to trickle down from Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley.
It is simply not good enough to blame the teams, the circuits, when it is they who are in charge of the sport. Also, all of this fancy Paris meetings involving the FIA have to be stopped, they are a complete waste of time and money.
There is so much that can be done to save this sport of ours, as long as those incharge have the desire and backbone to act, and act now!

dont blame bernie?
well he can be blamed for the cost of a race going up each year!
some famous old tracks cant even afford to host races anymore? whats wrong with having the same set price for each race/country each each year instead of a price for one and another proce for the other!
in 5-10 years it’s going to be almost all races in countries with little or no motorsport herritage!
one massive mistake F1 has made over the last few years imo is that the rules have been made to suit the Manufacturers and they only end up leaving when it suits them anyway, they always have and always will do it that way and the current situation in the financial world is really another for them to pull the pin!

Why not Chaz?
They do that in US racing (NASCAR, ALMS and Indy, I think) and it serves to keep the pit lane clearer for safety reasons and to make pitstops marginally longer which means that longer stints between stops are preferable – maybe that helps the racing quality as well.
What it really does require though is a squad of pit lane marshalls who check that everything is being done according to the rules. And I think these blokes could ensure better standards of Grand Prix pit stop procedures – less of the controversial ‘unsafe release of car from pit box’ kind of problem. As far as I know, the US pit lane marshals can deliver pretty-well instant penalties on offending teams without the need for endless deliberation by stewards as we have seen in F1.
I like the proposal (it would be a cost-saver too) – along with most of the rest of Brundle’s ideas.

No real reason really except that currently its operated so cool (most time) precise slick and perfect, whereas the others are frantic error prone and haphazard (in my opinion). Besides we need to have F1 differentiated from other motorsports somehow as they’re all becomming far to similar these days i.e. I want to watch F1 and not just another wannabe F1 series.

Keith – I was having a rather nerdy read through the F1 regs (at http://www.fia.com/resources/documents/471827260__2008_f1_sporting_regulations.pdf) when I noticed this reg “46) No more than 24 cars will be admitted to the Championship, two being entered by each competitor.”
and I wondered if the Super Aguri or Honda situation might have been saved by allowing them to run just one car instead of two. 60% of the expenditure, perhaps?
Recently posters to the blog have been wondering about th minimum number of competitors required to constitute an F1 GP. Here is the regulation “17) An Event may be cancelled if fewer than 12 cars are available for it.” But please remember this has nothing to do with Bernie’s contractural arrangements with the FIA, so he might have contracted for no fewer that 20, but as long as there is 12 or more, it’s a points-awarding GP from the FIA point of view.